Comedy Corner: A persimmon tree of family memories

It’s the nastiest fruit on the planet, and my mom loved to make cookies out of it.
It all started one year in the 1970s. My mom got this recipe from Grandmother Larson, my dad’s mother.
My grandmother would make wonderful desserts and loved to bake. She was one of these old-fashioned grandmothers you’d find in a 1950s TV show; she seemed to always be wearing a cooking apron with flour on it. She cooked for the church bakeoffs and won medals in the county fair. To this day, I swear, she made the best peanut butter cookies I have ever eaten. Every time we went over to her house, she was baking.
I guess my mom felt like she had to keep up with her mother-in-law when it came to cooking, so she always tried Grandma’s new recipes out on us kids. One day, my grandmother came over and gave her this persimmon cookie recipe. My mom honestly did not know what a persimmon was, and I remember her asking around to find out what they were. We found that they were a winter tree that produces a peach-sized orange fruit, that they shed all their leaves in the fall and that they have long, spindly limbs that looked like the trees you would find in horror movies (the kind that would reach out and grab you when you weren’t looking).
At that time, the markets did not sell them. They were a highly unpopular fruit, but as of yet, we did not know why.
So in the fall after school, my mom would drive around looking for these trees, and when we found them, she would make me and my sister walk up to the doors of these strangers and ask if we could pick their fruit. And, do you know, we never got a response of no. In fact, it was always, “Take as much as you want — we hate that tree!” So we would gather a huge basket of hard, orange, pool-ball-like things and head home.
I remember I was the first to bite into one, and I almost gagged. No — in fact, I did gag. It was just plain awful! My tongue swelled, and my mouth puckered up. But Mom insisted we skin them and chop them up for her cookies. Well, needless to say, it did not matter how much sugar one added; they still tasted awful.
Finally, my grandmother told her, after biting into one, that they needed to ripen until they were smooshy and rotten-looking, and that’s when they’d become sweet. “Oh!” was our collective reaction. (I secretly think my grandmother kept key information from my mom so she would stay as reigning queen of the kitchen, and of my dad’s culinary heart.)
Now and then, I see a persimmon tree out in the middle of some field or on the side of the road, and I think about my mom. She went to heaven a few years ago, and I wish I could just have one more bite of her persimmon cookies — with extra sugar, of course.
Michael Larson is a 14-year resident of Felton and an aspiring comedy writer. He lives with his dog Blue. Contact him at [email protected].